Weibo turns into Mass Apple Cult to honor Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

When news of Steve Jobs’ death hit Weibo this morning around 7:45am, the Chinese weibosphere absolutely exploded with tributes, quotes, videos, news, and photos. We logged on around 9am to find a big black bar across our Weibo homepage informing us of Jobs’ death, directing us to this page, which has received almost 50,000 comments. The page also links you to other sites where you can memorialize Jobs, take surveys about him, and discuss his influence on the digital world.On Sina’s list of the top forwarded Weibs of the day, Jobs makes it into 9 of the top 12 when we last checked, with the top post being forwarded 65,000 times and rising fast. And that’s nothing compared to Sina’s Breaking News weibo account – after their initial post on the death at 7:46am, then have had literally nothing but Steve Jobs coverage for four hours. Sina has also created this page devoted to him.We all knew Jobs was as popular in China as his much-loved Apple products, but yikes. It seems like people haven’t been this beside themselves since 1976.We’ll be posting more on Jobs’ death as news develops, to make sense of this sad turn of events.